JMSC Students’ Work Airs on RTHK

The JMSC has partnered with public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong (RTHK) to produce Cantonese news content for a weekly radio programme this semester.

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Students applied the skills learned from the JMSC’s Radio News and Online Journalism courses to produce five-minute segments for broadcast during RTHK Radio 1’s morning Talkabout show and its evening Phone Openline Openview.

The collaboration lasted for eight weeks from February to April and the JMSC team’s pre-recorded packages ran each Wednesday.

The team consisted of 12 students — six BJs, five MJs and one BA.

They put together pieces on the following topics: the public’s misunderstanding of psychopath; marriage trends between Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese couples; internet password security; awareness of online shopping and Groupon, dedicated volunteers’s commitment for Japan’s Tsunami, the poor’s increasing demand for food bank and the Occupy Central campaign.

One of the team members, MJ Chloe Deng, helped to produce a segment about password security for online accounts.

She explained that the team first did man-on-the-street inteviews to find out how people set their passwords. “Many of them said they often used birthdays and phone numbers and seldom changed passwords,” said Deng.

She said the team interviewed a local student whose Facebook account had been hacked, and the chairman of the Hong Kong Internet Society and a professor at City Univerity to find out how serious the problem of online security is and ask for solutions. It also asked an IT expert to offer some useful tips for choosing and remembering passwords.

Deng was delighted to be able to take part in such a project: “It offered me a valuable chance to work as a real journalist and to air my own work to the public,” she said.

Chloe Deng (MJ 2012)

“The instructors pointed out our problems and gave us useful suggestions. I have learnt how to make radio programmes, the skills of pronunciation, storyboarding, sound mixing and editing. Besides that, I can add this segment to my portfolio, which will add to my experience as a journalist and is useful for finding a job.”

Rachel Li, a veteran news broadcaster and a senior consultant for Breakthrough, a non-profit-making Christian organisation that provides cultural and educational services for young people, helped to prepare the students for the project.

“I want to offer a few words for the budding journalists I’ve worked with in this journey,” she said. “Curiosity, courage, and concern make good initiatives.”

“Professionalism (fairness, accuracy, depth, effort) and good attitude (active listening, persistence, humility) make a good story. Being a good partner is the first lesson to learn in order to become a good member of a newsroom.”

The University of Hong Kong, the JMSC’s parent institution, is one of five institutions that cooperated with RTHK on the project.